How to build an eCommerce website in 2022 – A Step-by-Step Guide
How to Build an eCommerce Website – A Step-by-Step Guide
While it might seem an immense mountain to climb, building an eCommerce website isn’t insurmountable. The key to success is to break the task down into bite-sized chunks that you can handle. Set small goals along the way to show yourself that you can make progress.
There are two ways to approach this very initial stage of the process. First, many people have a business idea to sell a product. For example, they have a new style of shoes, an online education course, or prints of their photography, and they want to sell them. The product is there, so the exercise is to make the website and connect customers with the product.
The other way to go about creating an online store may seem a little backward – but lots of people do it. Instead of starting with a product you want to sell, you start an eCommerce website to sell something that you don’t even know what is yet. People are buying stuff all the time, you just have to research to find something that sells!
Choose your shipping and delivery settings
Shopify comes with a built-in shipping integration that lets you select carriers, create and print labels, and automate notifications to your customers – all from a single dashboard. You can even save up to 88% with discounts on USPS, UPS, and DHL shipping rates.
Wix, on the other hand, requires a third-party shipping integration, such as ShipStation or ShipBob, to fulfill your orders. These services work just as well as Shopify Shipping; the only difference is the added step of integrating the app into your Wix store.
Regardless of your shipping solution, set shipping rates based on how much it costs to ship your products. For example, if it costs $7.20 to ship a T-shirt, you could charge $5 for shipping and build the remaining cost into the price of the product. Or, you can build the entire shipping cost into the price of the product and offer free shipping – it’s all a matter of personal preference.
E-commerce Website Launch Checklist
Now that your e-commerce store is prepared, integrated with third-party solutions, filled with content and optimized for conversions, it is time to get ready for the launch. With so many aspects that form the e-commerce business, it is easy to forget something. So, here is what you need to do in order to make your e-commerce website launch smooth and trouble-free.
Review your website copy
Take some time to check product descriptions and website banners, make sure the Terms & Conditions and FAQ pages are in place and totally clear, check copyright, your company contact information and do everything to make sure there are no “Lorem ipsum” texts, or spelling or grammar errors in your store.
Make sure all settings are right
You definitely want to be confident that taxes are set up right, emails can be sent and received, shipping is calculated properly, synchronization with third-party systems works seamlessly, your store can accept real payments and more.
Revise urls and redirects
Pay attention to all the links you have in the header and footer, sidebars and on different pages – make sure they all work and don’t lead to development or staging websites. If you have links to any external resources and services, make them open in a new tab.
Check SEO
Make sure your pages’ meta titles and meta descriptions contain the relevant information you want your potential customers to see when they find you in the search. They have to be compelling and tidy to make someone click on your links instead of your competitors’. Add descriptive alt tags for images to allow search engines to “read” and understand what they display.
Integrate Analytics
Analytics tracking and monitoring is essential to be done from day one because it will give you invaluable insights about your website visitors and customers. By having this data on hand, you can identify the most high converting pages, make conclusions about what’s working best and modify your sales strategy accordingly.
Backup your site
Separately from regular, automatic backups you need to have set up for your website, it is necessary to back up all website files and the database right before deploying your website. The price of a mistake can be very high in such a case, so extra accuracy will only be beneficial.
Go live
With few points, but all of them important for website launch, this “Starting an Online Business” checklist is a helpful instrument that clarifies pre-launch activities to be done for your store and will save your business from any possible mistakes that can happen while moving your website to live status.
Business Niche Impact on E-commerce Website Development
There are no identical businesses and websites, of course. Above we have described the processes and steps that are essential to build and launch an e-commerce website in general. Whether you are starting an online retail business or going to create a large international store with multiple sales channels, you will need to take all these steps and advance functionality of your store with features specific to your business. For example, if you sell furniture and home appliances, you need to deal with shipments of large parcels which sometimes have a non-standard shape. If you are in an online grocery business and sell products by weight, it is essential to take that into consideration when charging your clients so you may want to have the option to modify an authorized sum.
The two most obvious and expected questions we get asked by business owners are the cost and time required to create an e-commerce store. In general, these two points depend on the following aspects:
So how much does it cost to build an e-commerce website from scratch? In general, e-commerce store development for a website with basic functions will cost you around $10,000, while the price for custom or large-scale e-commerce store development will start at $50,000.
How long does it take to make an e-commerce website from scratch? A website with basic e-commerce functions will require a couple of months to complete and thoroughly test. For a more complex e-commerce store with powerful infrastructure and functionality, you will be looking at any time between 6 – 12 months. The timeline depends significantly on the number and level of specialists on the development team involved in the project.
Sources:
https://www.pixpa.com/blog/create-ecommerce-website
https://www.privy.com/blog/how-to-build-an-ecommerce-website
https://whidegroup.com/blog/steps-to-build-an-e-commerce-website-for-small-business/